Purchasing & Supply Chain Management

Buyers should be spending their time sourcing the right products and challenging suppliers for the greatest value, not chasing down shortages, backorders and pricing discrepancies through an inefficient paper trail. AcceLIM reduces the amount of time your buyers spend on problem transactions in several different ways.

Simply automating the order management process with all documentation digitized and available for instantaneous retrieval saves significant time compared to non-automated processes, but the way AcceLIM sets up your system maximizes your buyers’ time savings even further.

First, we reduce the number of employees who get involved in any specific problem transaction because when we set up your automated system, we set up clear lines of responsibility for every type of discrepancy that might come up. A buyer only spends time resolving those discrepancies that are assigned to them based on the business rules set up in our onboarding process.

Second, AcceLIM’s automated system immediately alerts your buyers to any issue they need to address, and along with the alert, provides all the documentation they need to resolve the discrepancy as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Finally, the number of problem transactions your buyers have to address begins to decrease within the first couple of quarters of coming on board with us. This happens partly because our reporting makes it obvious when there are patterns of repeated errors that should be dealt with, and at our follow up meetings we encourage your staff to address such recurring patterns. For example our reports might show that there are certain suppliers who are frequently slow to update pricing changes. Your buyers can then work with those suppliers to correct the root problem, which eliminates the recurring discrepancies, and reduces unnecessary demands on their time.

The most common automated order management systems focus on the traditional 3-way match for each transaction (ordered-received-invoiced). But in order to keep just-in-time inventory synchronized with suppliers’ production schedules, you may need many more points of communication. These additional points can occur anywhere in the process - early warnings on order confirmations and shipment notifications, shifts in production schedules, or multiple points of receipt, for example. Given these considerations, the 3-way match seems grossly inadequate – most organizations can benefit more from a 5 or 7-point match. AcceLIM can scale to whatever level of detail is needed for each individual order and audit to virtually any supply side order management transaction.

The challenges of finding alternative sources for partial or backordered items, detecting mismatched quantities on the loading dock and finding every billing discrepancy is enough to keep a CFO up at night. AcceLIM’s swift and thorough matching technology, combined with the clear flow of information to the right source ensures that issues are dealt with in as timely a manner as possible to keep a problem from spreading downstream - or upstream.

AcceLIM provides an intuitive, organized way to store all communications pertaining to an order, so buyers spend less time organizing and more time sourcing product and avoiding over/undersupply. Because of AcceLIM’s alert system and instant availability of all transaction-related information, discrepancies that could lead to oversupply or undersupply can be dealt with immediately.

Another supply chain management issue is the vast range in sophistication level of suppliers and in the methods they use for communication. EDI, despite its limitations, has come a long way in connecting sophisticated suppliers, but many smaller suppliers may still rely on paper-based documentation. With AcceLIM, all information comes across your buyers’ desks as electronic data regardless of how the supplier sends it. Within the first quarter after a typical customer comes on board with AcceLIM, about 75% of suppliers will switch to electronic communication if they haven’t already - simply because we invite them to. But other suppliers who don’t feel ready to switch to electronic data can make the transition at their own pace – or not at all. You get the benefits of an organized, digitized system without placing pressure on supplier relationships.